Be Excellent To Each Other

I've no real main pc anymore, I've an EEE901 and a very old 1.4 Athlon Evesham box, which is exclusively for uTorrent these days (can't manage more) and so I need a new either very good laptop or reasonably good desktop. Obviously I can get a ninja desktop for the same price as a very good laptop.

I'll be wanting to do: music (FL Studio with a few plugins), no more gaming than probably Football Manager and the odd RTS.

I'm open to suggestion on quality manufacturers these days, as I am happy to save for better and go without in the meantime.

Once caveat - NO ACER. Returned my year-old aspire due to a fault just before the warranty expired, it returned last week deemed fixed, perfect function for a week then the same problem returned worse than ever, post warranty of course, the drive began to not be found, etc. I could have argued the toss about the warranty, but unfortunately I smashed the thing into tiny pieces as this all occurred after a very frustrating day at work involving dead babies and so on.

I'll probably just get a dell, but I'm interested to see what people consider decent in PC land these days.

MacBook?

Toshiba, Dell, Mac. All solid.

I'd say not Dell, as my Dell laptop has been in for repairs four times and needed at least two on-site technician repairs (after the first few I lost count).

Would normally say if you are going down the laptop route. as they are ace.

But I would wait a while as there are strong rumours for new mac laptops being launched at the start of october.

There's always rumours and something around the corner. If you sat around all day reading the Mac anorak sites nobody would ever buy anything.

In anycase, all the deals are on the reconditioned units so you'll have quite a wait.

You need a trustworthy beard and a well built computer with colourful keys.



Or failing that a Mac with Parallels* installed. Tis the only way to go. I liked it so much I bought two.


* Parallels, for those who don't know, lets you run Windows in a window in Mac OS. Or you can boot into Bootcamp and use native Windows.

They are overdue an update.

Lots of chuff about how aluminum macbooks are shipping from china as we speak.

But yeah I agree.

The standard Macbooks presumably?

The plastic is nasty, but aluminum is a pain as well. I ended up having to buy a second skin for my Pro. Not only does it protect it, but actually makes it far nicer to hold and use because you actually have some grip on it.

Acer laptops are very good, and seem a little cheaper than their equivalent Dell model.
If you're going for desktop, you should really think about building it yourself. I'm typing this on my shiny new PC, and (so far) it's doing just fine. Big numbers, too:

Go to John Lewis and pick up an HP. Decent laptop, decent warranty and the ability to storm in and throw it at them if it breaks.

http://www.johnlewis.com/230493776/Product.aspx

For instance.

FTFY.

Use VMWare Fusion or that Sun VM, not Parallels Shitheap. I speak from experience.

As for new MacBooks, they'll show either after or near to the end of the current European 'back to school' promotion. However, current MacBooks are pretty good kit.

Or, if it's a laptop you're after:





Or, do this:

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Run_Mac_OS_X_on_an_Eee_PC

Parallels running on OS X running on an Eee is a potentially-awesome combination.

So do I. Have two licences on two machines running XP and both are just dandy. I understand Parallels was bad in the past, but I've been using it just fine. Can even run Premiere under it which is pretty impressive and a real boon.

As for caning the CPU, I've seen no evidence of that. In fact it barely manages to hog 1 core of the 8 core box.

Ah, but try running it along with, say, Photoshop and watch as your Mac screams in agony. Basically, Parallels is fine if you run it and it alone, but that's not great for a VM.


I'm running PD on a MacBook, rather than a Mac Pro, which clearly isn't the same as your set-up!

Also, John Lewis have quite a good price match scheme*.

*I have never used this, I am repeating hearsay (Pure and Simple.....)

I have it on a Macbook Pro though and it seems fine running alongside Final Cut, Motion, etc.

Woah. That's mental. I must borrow my workmate's EEE and try it.

You are a lucky man, then. A dev friend of mine was nearly reduced to tears by PD. He was running it on a MBP with Photoshop, and it just killed his machine. He installed VWM Fusion and notes that when it's in the background, it actually uses less CPU than Safari. Personally, I'm also sick of PD's bugs. The interface is shoddy and settings are often ignored. (If the fucking thing downloads yet another fucking update again, despite me very definitely telling it not to fucking do so, I'm going to be really fucking annoyed.)

@kalmar: Only mental people try to install OS x on an Eee. I like the caveats: no sound, no Flash, no Ethernet, no wireless (unless you use a useless third-party driver), no function-key support.

Fair enough. To do less arsing about with stuff which doesn't work properly is why I got a Mac in the first place.

I would like a small cute apple laptop though..

I installed a trial version of a few months ago Parallels. Not only did it not work, but it completely broke my XP install and I've not been able to run Windows on my iMac since.

Just to counter this my Dell Precision M70 has been completely faultless in the three years that I've now had it. However I think it was quite a pricey one at the time but since work bought it I don't really know.

Those EEE PCs are just the cutest thing I have ever seen and I want one!

I was in a pub when a friend whipped his out and suddenly we were all coo-ing over it, especially when he put in his camera's SD card and the pictures started to appear.

Where do you get them from?

Arrgh, mind...boggling...

Gah, beat me to it; I was looking for Mimi's startled Mr Bounder. The MAKE STARTLED MR BOUNCER AN OFFICIAL DIMLIE campaign starts here!



...but apart from that, it works great!

Apparently the best mini laptop for that kind of thing is the MSI Wind (also sold in this country as the Advent 4211 at PC World and the Medion Akoya E1210 at, um, Aldi):

http://www.modaco.com/content/asus-eee- ... vent-4211/

The only issues are that the headphone socket doesn't work and neither does wireless (but that can be fixed with a ~£15 mini PCI-E card).



It was the bit about inserting the SD card to make pictures appear that got me giggling...

Most importantly, the EEE laptops come in a lovely pale apple green colour. That is the most important thing when choosing laptops, obviously - colour.



There he is.

That has to become a proper smilie. I practically demand it.

Eee PCs are fantastic bits of kit if you are on the road a fair bit. They won't replace a desktop or a laptop, but they are superb for being away from work for a short while, and just running the essentials.

It was worth every penny just to be able to do our honeymoon blog from anywhere. It didn't miss a beat was easy to lug through eight airports.

Mine has to right now

Fair play though, Xandros is being fairly kind and tweakable for me, things are more or less how I want them now. Just wish there was Firefox 3 in a standard repository.

For the first time in my life, I'm almost considering a Mac, but I looked at imacs yesterday and they start at 800

Two words, Mac Mini.

If you get a second hand core duo 17" iMac like mine (which they don't make any more), those seem to be about 350 on ebay. Sure, you'd get a reasonable laptop for that, but I'd had my fill of troublesome laptops when I got this, and I can't say I regret it..

Means you can get an EEE as well at a later point, to play about with

Just to stick up for Dell a bit, I bought the cheapest laptop in their range a year or so ago and it's been pretty damn good -- got some discoloured pixels on a small part of the screen but that's about the only criticism I can think of. Oh, no v-sync under OpenGL is a bit shoddy given how prevalent Intel's integrated GFX chipsets are. Struggling to come up with anything else -- been very happy with it.

I just replaced my ancient, creaking WinME desktop with a Mac Mini which means that Apple will probably release new models tomorrow. It is, I must admit, a very lovely thing indeed -- I was planning to get it dual-booting to XP, for FLStudio also, but having messed around with Garage Band a bit I wonder if I'll bother now. I guess it depends how much I miss my VSTIs.

A mate of mine bought an EeePC and ended up swiftly returning it for a refund -- the file manager kept going AWOL or summat. To be honest, if you're going to plump for a netbook rather than a laptop, I struggle to see the point of going for anything but the stuff in the £200 range. Looking at various reviews recently, the Acer Aspire One looks like, er, one to consider alongside the Asus.

The file manager thing is down to the 'simple' interface being a bit cobbled together, even after a year of eee iterations. My 901 had that problem after a certain update, but anyone who can type in 'Eee file manager disappeared problem' to the Firefox searchbar is going to learn a tiny amount of terminal linux (which is no bad thing at all, in fact every command you learn makes you feel that little bit more comfortable and makes the OS feel far more your plaything to bend to your will, as opposed to the strict or semi-strict alternatives MacOS or Windows) and get the problem solved in no time. I still boot mine to simple as I can then just launch the one app I need in record time, should I need to (i.e. on a son to move train but can see a wifi sign and need footy scores) or for a few seconds more I can get the full desktop. Still faster than windows.

The Eee is something I've not felt since my ST, the 16-bit era... a specific platform with a few differring models, and an OS that is utterly pliable to your will, full control... but be careful using it. This thing has character, and the good things, the things that match or surpass a £100 OS, make up for and inspire you to find a solution for the weaker points of the default full-mode settings.

Again, a n00b can google for full mode unlock on the 901 (where it is hidden), can learn quickly how to boot to full mode as default, and understand why, and gain insight invaluable in understanding the OS throughout. I'm enjoying sifting repositories and wondering how better to configure synaptic to do so, and browsing forums for hints, and wondering about how cheaply I can get a linux box and have it as a music server with Amarok, on my lcd I currrently use the 360 on for that purpose. I'd jump on a Eee Box, at this point. With a 1tb USB drive full of w4r3z, pR0nZ, mp3s and t0rr3ntZ.

The age of home computing as a proper exploratory hobby died when the utimate geek machine, the PC got to a certain point. Anything but a spread sheet on a PC was (morally speaking) a hack of sorts, not twenty years ago. I think it was the advent of CDs a a storage medium that swung it to Microsoft. Being a fully customisable platform saw is contorted into this shape and that, and it is now realising its potential. For a hundred and fifty quid, you can knock together a machine with parts from Maplin which will run the media production Ubuntu nicely and far outstrip in performance anything music production IT wise from the eighties or indeed nineties. Or just like the audiogeeks who spend hundreds on a metre of speaker cable, a gaming rig for two grand is no problem if you have the cash, and it will probably remain totally current for a good three months. Or at least until the next game worth buying, not torrenting, comes out. Whatever specific purpose (or light multifunction) you want a PC for, you can get one. But it's not like when you got your Amiga. Or even your Amstrad.

Nah, the Eee is different from the rest of PCville, including the Acer and MSI(Advent) models (Dells I've no clue about). The others I've used, and are very nice indeed. Tiny versions of the 15" cousins around the 400 price bracket, they do their job well, but they are simply shrunken versions, whereas the Eee has a charm and character not unbecoming of a better Mac, or an Amiga, or even a ZX81. It has identity, learning the OS is like learning Workbench. Open Source software lacks polish in the same way the 16 bit ST/Amiga Format cover disk software used to, and that was the stuff our hobby was built upon. In spirit, this is the direct follow-up to those 16-bit machines, I reckon. Just as the DS or Wii were 'another path' for the games industry, the Eee allows you to justify purchase on th basis of having a hobby machine to learn and tinker with, but which is ultra-portable and can rise to rather more occasions that the very light user will ever know.

Unless it breaks, no regrets at all on the Black 901 Linux version here. And I spent £270 on it. My wife's got the Windows version. Wouldn't trade now, even ignoring my greater storage capacity, which is juuuuust right capacity wise. Got a $40 160gb usb drive anyhow, for my pr0nZ.

Although I've stuck Windows on mine, the bits about "character" are spot on. They've spread like wildfire at the College I am working at, as a tool that is light, simple to use and just works. To be honest, I feel that later models are getting away from the very tightly focused original and I'm not sure that is a good thing - I bought mine because it had a job to do, and that job it has done brilliantly. I wouldn't buy a Ferrari to do the shopping in and every time I see one turned into a server, runs OS X or is some kind of hacked together developers machine my heart sinks a little.

In those days computers were designed to be programmed. Amstrad even published a firmware manual for the CPC so you could learn all the hacks and internals of the machines.

Modern PC's just aren't designed to be programmed at machine code level. Everything is high level, which is sad. You just don't see stuff that makes you go "wow" on a PC whereas on your CPC/Spectrum/Amiga someone was always pushing it.

You're obviously not visiting the right websites.

These days a decent level of control over the OS is worth a wow. People used to push blittters, now they push OpenGL, or DirectX.

Frankly so long as you are doing something beyond typing noughts and ones, you are a degree of separation away from what is really going on. But yes things are different now. Ubuntu comes out twice a year, and Vista's replacement is well in the works. Apple render everything obsolescent 18 months after launch. The multitude of platforms and iterations thereof mean people either work a broad spectrum of platofrms or pick a loyalty and stick to it. That's not difficult with a Xandros Eee. And you can run it alongside your main pc and laptop, like the Wii sat by your PS2 and 360. It has massive niche.

I really thoguht Ubuntu when I first tried it (Edgy Eft) felt very much like a 16-bit progression, and now I've the hardware to round things off and a fairly flexible but not overwhelming and resource-light OS to fuck about with.

YAY COPPER BARS

...but apart from that, it works great!

Apparently the best mini laptop for that kind of thing is the MSI Wind (also sold in the UK as the Advent 4211 at PC World and the Medion Akoya E1210 at, um, Aldi):

http://www.modaco.com/content/asus-eee- ... vent-4211/

The only issues are that the headphone socket doesn't work and neither does wireless networking, but that can be fixed with a ~£15 mini PCI-E card.

Speaking of illegally running OS X on a PC:

http://gizmodo.com/5049756/review-efix- ... -pc-to-mac

*strokes beard* Niiiiiice...

http://www.theproduct.de/

Any of their 64kb demos or 96kb game.

There is NO way that should fit or be possible. At all.